When it comes to closing an M&A deal, how you present your company – specifically, how you present the documents that measure your company’s strengths and performance is the key to success. The goal, of course, is to present the most accurate and compelling picture of your company to a group of investors who see the value of investing in your company for potential future profits. A virtual data room is the best platform to enable the secure sharing of sensitive business data between parties that are in the process of investigating one another.
Today, investment banks routinely store all of the information potential investors will need to complete their due diligence process in a virtual data room. These data rooms are digitally secured and can be accessed only via a secure login process. The secure login enables the investment bank to know exactly who has accessed the data room and what they have viewed or downloaded. Here’s what a good VDR should have:
Security:
In a world where more and more companies are going online and leaving less of a physical paper trail, it makes sense that security features should be a high priority.
Virtual data rooms are often used by companies for holding sensitive information. A leak of any content could be catastrophic for businesses. Modern VDRs, such as DealRoom, understand how important it is to securely lock away sensitive and confidential papers, documents, and communication.
Document Control:
Security is at the heart of any good modern virtual data room. It is its ability to secure and control sensitive documents while sharing them with third parties that differentiates a VDR. A good virtual data room utilizes enterprise-grade security, even on computers and devices that are outside the control of a firm’s IT department. Because of this, there are several different security procedures in place to help store your important information including detailed file permissions. You can set file permissions to view, download, download original, and edit or you can set it to view only and restrict its download to prevent information leaks. You can also change the settings so that only select users have permission to view files and documents, which is perfect for when you have something you’d like to remain between an exclusive few.
Additional VDR security features include strict ID protocol, two-factor authentication, encrypted and protected data, and customizable allowances.
Content Organization and Presentation:
An intuitive and easily structured, attractive, and professional way of presentation of documents enables efficient and rapid review of the documents on all devices. A good VDR allows you the additional flexibility to organize documents with tags rather than merely with a folder structure. Frequently, it’s necessary to place the same file in multiple locations in your hierarchical organization, especially during due diligence. With a folder structure, you’re required to make copies of the file and place the copies accordingly. But with a tag structure, you can simply tag the same file with multiple tags, and the same file becomes visible in each location.
You can access a VDR from Anywhere, Anytime, and on Any Device:
Anyone who has permission to access the VDR can do so from any location, any time horizon, and any device including mobiles.
User Activity Monitoring:
A fully-featured VDR allows for page-level tracking of who’s seen what, when, and for how long. This user activity monitoring not only generates detailed audit trails necessary for compliance but also provides insightful business intelligence into your users’ document review progress, interests, and preferences. This allows you to assuage their concerns by addressing those concerns proactively. In addition, a good VDR lets you track IP addresses and has flexible, built-in analytics as well.
A good virtual data room’s servers are located at world-class data centers and hosted by a high-end service provider. They ensure comprehensive security and reliability through multiple levels of redundancy. Moreover, their servers are high availability with hot-swappable components and the data center infrastructure is designed for high reliability, including redundant network connectivity, power systems, cooling systems, routers, and cabling.
Faster Document Preparation and Review:
Most often the due diligence timelines are compressed, demanding speed and efficiency to be of paramount importance. A good VDR allows you to quickly and easily streamline administrative setup and maintenance tasks.
Seamless Technical Integration:
A good virtual data room offers multiple solutions for seamlessly incorporating the data room into your existing business processes.
Any missing data generates doubt in an interested investor buyer and can erode trust or break the deal. The most important step for any business owner seeking investors is to ensure that all company data is updated, accurate, organized, and of course, readily accessible. And good virtual data room is among the most important tools utilized by the investment bank representing the business owner in the transaction.
The DocullyVDR team is a provider of a new generation secure data sharing platform designed for businesses. The team has extensive experience in working with document sharing platforms and has been assisting the Virtual Data Room community since 2019 by providing users with free information.